[pif]

I am always surprised that people get shocked when online privacy is put at risk, as if it was a fundamental human right.

REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO!

And what happened in these decades are enough for the societies to wonder whether this new possibility in human connections (i.e. remote privacy) is globally a good thing. Just stomping your feet because the new toy may be declared illegal is not helping anyone. Governments are expressing serious doubts: this discussion needs serious interventions, not temper tantrums.

[throwaway72587]

This is 100% wrong. Privacy has been the norm every time someone wandered a week by feet from home, or sent a letter. Famous authors published for a whole lifetime under pseudonyms.

We are living in a panopticon that never existed before.

[pif]

> every time someone wandered a week by feet from home

Remote privacy means that you don't have to move from home.

> or sent a letter

Which anybody could just intercept and read.

> Famous authors published for a whole lifetime under pseudonyms.

But someone had to know who they were and where they lived, and they could be convinced to share such information.

[tavavex]

You see, when the governments are outraged that they can't monitor all facets of communication or are disallowed from using their shiny new ways to automatically observe and categorize billions of datapoints to automatically surveil-by-default millions of people, that is called having serious doubts and grave concerns, very important stuff. When the people are outraged that a freedom they've enjoyed for several decades now, many growing up with them, are taken away, that is called throwing a toddler temper tantrum, how abhorrent. Why can't you just be reasonable and compromise will all these legitimate concerns that they somehow didn't care about in the last 30 years? Stop protesting or being angry, you need to sit at the table and have a 'serious discussion' (in 100% of cases when this is brought up in this tone, that means "give endless concessions and compromises to make them go two steps forward, one step back - just give them everything they want, but incrementally this time!")

[pif]

You see, when someone talks about "the governments" without realising that they do represent the people in a democracy, their ignorance show so much that it is difficult for them to attract any sympathy in those places where the laws are discussed.

[basilikum]

It is ignorant to believe that democracy is a stable, self regulating equilibrium that maintains itself purely through elections.

The people in power in a democracy do not not persecute their dissidents because they are better people or because they got to power by being elected by the people, but because good democratic systems hold the people in power accountable to the general population. A surveillance state does the opposite. It holds the people accountable to the government.

Democracies stay democratic because the people hold power over the state and have means to get informed about the state. That requires for example journalism and protection for journalists and their sources. When the state can trivially find the sources of journalists and surveil the investigations of journalists before they can even publish anything that protection is no longer given.

When the state can know exactly all the people that participated in a protest that gives the state power over the people and takes power away from the people.

When the state can know exactly where in important organizations of all kinds there are dissidents so it can replace them before they can organize...

[tavavex]

I'm sure all the people in the world suddenly did a 180 over the course of the last year, often with no new elections held, and all the governments are merely addressing their concerns by moving in complete lockstep with the exact same sets of policies proposed after ignoring 'the problems' for decades. After all, we live in a happy wonder world with perfect representation, direct democracy and absolutely no malicious actors, corruption, lobbying and coordination that is not controllable by ordinary people in any meaningful way - at least, as long as that thought-terminating assumption helps me argue for what I like. Stop protesting against Democracy (me).

[watwut]

The surveillance economy was brought in by people who were pontificating about freedom. Freedom for companies created it and bad faith arguments about freedom sustained it. The evil governments were Johny come lately here, basically. I have read absolutists libertarian rants about "the governments" trying to remove the freedom. In overwhelming majority of the cases, these people were actually supporting fascists and those strong rants were just tools to achieve that goal.

And now, general public is pissed about consequences of what large companies caused so much, that it is willing to put a lot of power into the hand of evil government, because they see it as less evil.

[tavavex]

To me, again, this doesn't look like a real attempt by the people to counteract the corporations, although it's certainly sold and advertised that way. I think it's the world's biggest collaboration project between tech megacorporations and governments. Many companies stand to gain a lot from the removal of privacy, because it discourages competition and funnels users away from doing anything on their own and towards compliant services owned by these companies. More importantly, these companies will be the enforcement arm of many anti-privacy technologies. They're the ones who will be sifting through internet traffic, processing pictures of your IDs, organizing datapoints about everything you've ever done on their services. All mandated by governments as part of the world's largest conflict of interest. All the governments will do is just bundle these streams of data into narratives and timelines, a full automatic dossier on everyone without ever having to do actual old-school spying on them.

[monssooon]

This is much bigger than online privacy. It is about survailance and control of society. And possibly even a completely new society. Or a splitting of society into groups...

But to your point on anonymity. That has been protected in letter writing e.g. and also privacy has been considered a human right. Until now...

But maybe you have a point in saying that no temper tantrums are needed.

[harvey9]

How do you define remote privacy? Beyond a few decades ago I could use a phone booth and pay in coins.

[pif]

And any phone could be tapped with a signature by a judge.

[thephyber]

An individual phone… while targeting a specific crime and a specific suspect. The person could use a different phone and remain anonymous.

The difference is that one is very granular and done in reaction to a crime. The other is a wide scale collection of data which is necessary recorded.

[yabones]

This issue here isn't surveillance as per a signed warrant. I don't think anybody's really arguing against that.

The problem is mass data collection without suspicion, probable cause, or warrants whatsoever. That's a brand new thing, other than the places in the world unfortunate enough to have roving gangs of police going door to door and searching homes without warrants. This facilitates it on a scale that's never really been seen before in human history.

[pif]

> This issue here isn't surveillance as per a signed warrant. I don't think anybody's really arguing against that.

Everybody who talks about cryptography is arguing about that! With the digital technology we have, the options are very simple: either every man in the middle can read (even the villain), or nobody can (not even the justice departments). There's no middle ground.

[Hendrikto]

Which is a MAJORLY different system than general surveillance of the whole populace.

[basilikum]

> REMOTE PRIVACY NEVER EXISTED BEFORE A FEW DECADES AGO!

That is plain wrong.

You could absolutely send a letter anonymously without showing your ID. You could use a phone booth without showing your ID. Increasingly more countries demand ID verification for such things like getting a SIM card that used to be remote privacy.

But much more importantly you are making a false differentiation between 'remote' and local privacy. Before the internet that made some amount of sense. What you do in the locality of your home is private and what you do in public is not, such as buying a book in a store.

However two things have fundamentally changed since then:

1. This difference largely does not exist anymore. Things that used to be in your home and private and are now in some way or another in internet connected computers that act as surveillance devices. Your movie and book library used to sit on a bookshelf in the privacy of your home and only you would know when you watch a movie. Today it sits on Amazon's or Netflix servers and they know exactly what and when you watch and read. In fact turning the digital library you "bought" into something you own by converting them into a format you can store locally and use without restrictions and surveillance (local privacy) is illegal and punishable with jail time under the DMCA.

Notes written in a note book used to be local privacy, now they are written on a computer that automatically, without consent uploads them to "the cloud", a server controlled by a large corporation that acts as a panopticon for the state.

I could go on forever. Our lives are increasingly digital. That in itself would not necessitate being "remote", but in reality that is what follows, because people do not control their devices. Instead these devices are surveillance appliances controlled by corporations and increasingly the state.

2. Technology did not just enable the means for more anonymity, but also for a completely new, fundamentally different level of automated, all encompassing surveillance.

Before the internet you went into a store and bought a book with cash. You were not anonymous in the strict sense, the cashier could see you and might even recognize you, but you did not have to show your ID for everything you buy. The cashier did not create a log with your legal name and all the items you bought. Sure, the cashier might know you bought that book, but no one else did. There was no central surveillance log of every purchase accessible to corporations and the state.

Today credit cards are exactly that. Many countries have begun attacking cash as part of the war on privacy. We are heading towards a world where you effectively have to show your ID for absolutely everything you buy and every purchase will be logged.

CCTV is old, but the footage used to sit on tapes in the possession of individual stores and tracking someone's movements with this was a massive amount of work that would only make sense for specific investigations like murder cases.

Now CCTV is everywhere and systems like Palantir collect them all in a central system that logs everyone's movements all the time. The government can just search for "people who met with X in the last month" and get a log of all these people, their complete movement profiles, the people they met with etc.

Letters weren't exactly well protected, but no one would read your letters because it was infeasible. Now we have the infrastructure to automatically read all messages sent by anyone and the government can just get notified of anyone who voices in private communications that they do not like strawberries or the ruling political party.

Western democracies are building the wet dream of the Stasi, something that just a few years ago was supposedly an authoritarian dystopia and our great enemy. We were supposedly so much better than the bad guys of the Stasi. Now we are building a future where we are still different from the Stasi, because we are making it outdated.

[CJefferson]

While you could send a letter anonymously, it was also trivial for the government to read any letter it wanted.

The problem is we have switched from a world where it was easy to let the government read selected communications (single phones, letters), to one where it's hard not to give them access to everything or nothing.

Personally, if there was some 'magic wand' way I could let the government keep it's previous levels of control in the internet age (they could individually pick users and put work into monitoring their communications, with a clear low limit on the number they can previously watch), I personally would.

But that's hard to do -- it's not obvious it's possible at all, so we need to define a 'new normal', but let's not pretend we aren't taking a huge amount of existing power away from governments with large scale encryption.

[basilikum]

> let's not pretend we aren't taking a huge amount of existing power away from governments with large scale encryption.

For sure we were. That was the whole idea of the cypherpunks. Now we are going towards the opposite. The hope that computers and the internet would empower the people ultimately turned out wrong. The technology absolutely allows this, the things we do with it is as a society is the opposite.

[phatfish]

Yup, demoractic governments existed before the internet and repressive dictators have risen with it.

The idea that being anonymous online will save a society from a dictator/repression is wishful thinking.

Only good faith engagement with an existing democractic system will ensure the success of democracy, but that is too hard for most poeple.

99.9% on anonymous engagement online is bad faith.

[thephyber]

> The idea that being anonymous online will save a society from a dictator/repression is wishful thinking.

Strawman.

> Only good faith engagement with an existing democractic system will ensure the success of democracy

This isn’t true. Voters are occasionally very willing to vote in demagogues, authoritarians, and fascists.

The founding fathers knew that democracy came with it the chance of mob rule.

The solution isn’t to guarantee that nobody has any anonymity online. It’s to make society more resilient by increasing media literacy. Countries which border Russia (notably Finland and Ukraine) are doing an amazing job at resisting the industrial volume of manufactured propaganda. Countries with gullible people just become victims to it.